Category Archives: Couch Commerce

This week we have been to Dublin to visit, exhibit and pitch at the Web Summit. As we are currently raising our Series A with CouchCommerce this was a great opportunity to present CouchCommerce to international investors.

Thousands of startups applied and we were among the 200 lucky ones that got an invitation to pitch in a three day battle. The 200 startups were grouped into Alpha (less than $ 1m raised) and Beta (between $1m and $3m raised). As part of the Beta group we had to pitch for one of the 20 seats in the semi-finals the first day.

At 10pm that evening (after already having had our first Guinness’s that night) we were excited to get the invitation to the semi-finals the next day. That day we had to pitch against 8 other startups in our session of which only one would make it to the finals. In total there were only 3 Beta startups chosen to pitch in the finals. Here are some impressions of the stage and a video of my semi-finals pitch:

We did not make it to the finals but still had a great time in Dublin and were able to get to know many startups, investors and web enthusiasts from around the world. With more than 20.000 visitors the Web Summit might already be too big but the great thing about this European event is that it really attracts people from all around the world. In our Beta Pitch group there were only 4 German startups out of 100. About 50% were from the US. So we hope that more German startups will participate in the pitch next year to establish international business relationships like we did.

Just a quick one: This month something happened we have been working towards and anticipating at CouchCommerce for more than two years. With Shopify the first large international e-commerce platform announced that it has reached 50%+ mobile traffic share across all shops. And even European focused companies like Zalando have reached 40%+ mobile traffic share by now.

E-commerce is now becoming a true mobile-first game and I could not be more excited about it!

As I recently mentioned in a post shop merchants often approach me and ask about the difference between a shop with responsive templates and single page web apps like the ones we offer at CouchCommerce. Because written explanations are not exciting and cannot show all the differences in usability and app feeling we recorded a short video that I like to share with you.

The setup was an iPhone 5c connected to the 3G network. Using this smartphone we are opening the best RWD template available for Shopware and the latest demo web app from CouchCommerce. Both share the same inventory and products.

This was the exercise: open the shop via bookmark, navigate into the categories “Genusswelt” -> “Edelbrände” and select the product “Cigar Special 40%” to add it to the cart. Then go to the checkout and stop at the point where you start to enter personal information as a new customer.

Here is the result:

You can see how responsive shop templates behave compared to a single page web app. The gesture support and speed of single page web apps is, even though they run in the browser, as good as you know it from native apps that need to be installed from app stores. To the contrary responsive templates work like every other website and need to request next pages from the servers on every click. This fundamental difference causes the huge timing difference in our video.

During this test we had good 3G reception. But as soon as you are on the go and have interruptions and slow downs of the connection the difference will be even more significant. Single page web apps even keep working in case you lose the entire connection. You will never see a “404 page not found” error.